29.

A Common Experience

Finally the day came when I had written down everything I could, every

last memory of the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View, the Gateway,
and the Core.
Then it was time to read. I plunged into the ocean of NDE literature—
an ocean into which I’d never so much as dipped a toe before. It didn’t
take me long to realize that countless other people had experienced the
things I had, both in recent years and centuries past. NDEs are not all the
same, each one is unique—but the same elements show up again and
again, and many I recognized from my own experience. Narratives of
passing through a dark tunnel or valley into a bright and vivid landscape
—ultra-real—were as old as ancient Greece and Egypt. Angelic beings—
sometimes winged, sometimes not—went back, at least, to the ancient
Near East—as did the belief that such beings were guardians who
watched the activities of people on earth and greeted those people when
they left it behind. The sense of being able to see in all directions
simultaneously; the sensation of being above linear time—of being above
everything, essentially, that I had previously thought of as defining the
landscape of human life; the hearing of anthem-like music, which entered
through one’s whole being rather than simply one’s ears; the direct and
instantaneous reception of concepts that normally would have taken a
very long time and a great deal of study to comprehend, without any
struggle whatsoever . . . feeling the intensity of unconditional love.
Over and over, in the modern NDE accounts and in spiritual writings
from earlier times, I’d feel the narrator struggling with the limitations of
earthly language, trying to get the entirety of the fish they had hooked on
board the boat of human language and ideas . . . and always, to one degree
or another, failing.
And yet, with each attempt that fell frustratingly short of its goal, each